Silence on drone strike decisions is deafening

Like the atomic bomb, drones have expanded the limits of presidential power. How far will those limits be stretched?

The possibility of nuclear Armageddon resulted in presidents gaining power to wage world war in response to an attack. The reasoning was there wasn't time for Congress to act given the speed of intercontinental missiles.

But we couldn't wait for the missiles to hit before retaliating, and could we be sure there was an attack? In 1960 the radar station at Thule in Greenland was bombarded with signals that turned out to be coming from the moon. That time, the fail-safes worked. Had they failed, the moon would have started World War III.

The stakes aren't as high with drones, but they are high enough. How can we hope to win the hearts and minds of Afghans and Pakistanis and Yemenis when drone strikes against terrorists wind up killing innocent bystanders?

"Civilians have been killed" in drone strikes, according to John Brennan, nominated by President Obama to be CIA director. But, "it is exceedingly rare, and much, much rarer than many allege," he said in written answers to questions by the Senate intelligence committee.

Some critics claim 10 civilians have died for every mid- or upper-level terrorist killed. Strikes have been carried out against funeral processions, presumably of terrorists. "Such killings usually harden militants' determination to fight, stalling any potential negotiations and settlement," Barbara Elias-Sanborn wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine.

It's hard to get reliable statistics because many of the strikes are carried out by the CIA and thus are secret. The use of covert agencies to launch lethal attacks raises other interesting questions that no one seems willing to explore.

And all these acts of war - what else would you call a bombing raid? - are carried out with little or no congressional oversight.

Writing at Esquire's political blog, Stephen Marche succinctly summed up how problematic the drone program is, and how troubling the administration's "white paper'' justifying targeting American citizens overseas is:

"What's so terrifying about this white paper is that it's unconstitutional, not in the sense that it violates any particular tenet of the American Constitution, but in that it doesn't respect the premise of there being a Constitution in the first place. The whole idea of having a Constitution is that no individual gets to decide what's an exception to it.''

Yet, here we are.

Others have also expressed deep qualms. "If other states were to claim the broad-based authority that the United States does, to kill people anywhere, anytime, the result would be chaos," according to a U.N. special report quoted in Time magazine.

Of course, the average person cares little who is being killed in strikes on the other side of the world. But how will they feel when drones are being used to spy on them in their homes? That is not as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance.

A year ago Obama ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to expedite the process of using drones in civilian airspace. They could be guided by everyone from police surveying crime scenes to hobbyists just having fun.

What sort of information might drones collect, and how could it be used? "Who owns it? Who stores it? Who shares it? Big questions," said Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution.

Aside from issues of privacy at home, we should be concerned about the extension of presidential power abroad. Interestingly, many of those who think Washington has exceeded its authority in everything from public schools to public health have little to say about this.

If we kill the terrorists at the cost of eroding the Constitution's safeguards against dictatorship, the price is too high.

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Silence on drone strike decisions is deafening

Like the atomic bomb, drones have expanded the limits of presidential power. How far will those limits be stretched?